Which Walks - by Laura Moriarty (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A series of poems that explores walking, writing, and making as divinatory practices.

Documenting (and interrogating) the poet's daily walks, Which Walks investigates the twin practices of walking and art-making while aging. Gender is also a central concern in this intensely feminist work. Moriarty's book relates to the endlessly unfinished journeys of Nathaniel Mackey's long poems, as well as to the dailiness of many writers from Charles Baudelaire to Robert Creeley. These poems are an extension of the author's visual practice, which she is returning to after a fifty-year break. Here she succeeds in existing--even thriving--in today's strange, often terrifying, world.

Review Quotes

"We age as we see; we see in our aging all we have done--all we have made, all we have read, everyone we have known--and it's this seeing that moves us in and through and out beyond the world. Laura Moriarty's Which Walks proves it. This is a profound and intimate study of being with at a crucial time where many feel without. A book (and a way to love) that we need."
--Renee Gladman

"A bold feminist collection of poems about making art, walking, and writing. Inspired by her everyday walks, these poems, which also extend her visual practice, dig into what it means to age and continue to create in an increasingly terrifying world. Following in the footsteps of Nathaniel Mackey and Charles Baudelaire, Moriarty highlights the rarely seen moments that shape how we live and perceive."
--Alta Journal

"This is a book of attention, of poems composed across a meditative, thinking space, set purposefully and perpetually in the present moment; a book of and around time, both the movement of such and its seeming immobility, a continuous present, offering echoes, even ripples, of time."
--rob mclennan

"In Which Walks, Laura Moriarty turns her expansive curiosity and attentive intelligence towards a world beset by plague and precarity, transforming "what almost doesn't exist//yet persists" and "clearing what has died into//what is born by the poem of the mind." Moriarty is our intrepid "archeologist of the present" offering this long poem of expansive love to attune our walking, making, and remembering."
--Alli Warren

"In this ambitious sequence written during the pandemic, Laura Moriarty embraces the dislocation such an event forces. Thrown free of 'epistemic framework, ' she sees herself as if from the outside, an "old woman" gathering debris from which to make art. To find oneself 'old' in the midst of a shocking global disaster is a double displacement. Moriarty confronts this situation with a clear-eyed detachment not unlike a state of shock. 'Where we stand//mindfully outside the universe of words/...suspended in the phantom of equilibrium, '--and now aware that the stability we once assumed is an illusion. From this strange position (or perhaps superposition) inside and outside the sayable, Moriary makes language sing."
--Rae Armantrout

"Laura Moriarty has unique wit and humor--and perhaps the most perceptive engagement with words anyone's had for years. They are her pleasure, her resource, her wisdom and company, and she shares them with generous abandon. Here one may finally see that what's said makes a world endlessly, over and over and over. Hers is an abiding delight."
--Robert Creeley

About the Author

Laura Moriarty grew up in Cape Cod and northern California. She studied at Sacramento State University and the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry and two novels. Moriarty served as archive director for the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University. She has taught at Naropa University, the Otis Art Institute, and Mills College. Her honors include a Poetry Center Book Award, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry, a New Langton Arts Award, and a Fund for Poetry grant. She lives in Northern California.